Nadja - Bodycage

My name is Scrambles and I'm lost

Remember about a year and a half ago, I was doing some Taste Swap Challenges with fellow reviewer friends of mine?  Well I asked the dronemeister caspian to be my fourth swap, and then I promptly sat here for a year and a half, having absolutely no fucking clue what to say about this Nadja album he gave me.

Well after all this time the album has had to soak, I think I've finally reached some sort of conclusion.  That conclusion being I don't know what sounds are anymore.

For real, Bodycage takes me to another world every time I listen to it, the problem is that I'm not sure how pleasant of a world it is, and I mean that in a good way.  There's a surprising amount of subtle beauty hiding beneath the layers of oppressive fuzz, but it doesn't work to the album's detriment like I would normally say it would.  If anything, it makes it worth repeated listens, because there's always another layer to the onion here.  The first spin of this album left me feeling cold and confused, the second left me... well colder and more confused.  Now after all this time, I'm coldest and most confused, but it's a good pain.  I'm really not well versed in drone (basically all I really know are a few Sunn O))) albums), but this works really well in the sense that it puts you in a shoegaze-y trance and sort of enraptures itself around you.

Pointing out individual tracks is somewhat pointless, since there are only three and they're all very long and similar to one another to my ears, but this works in the sense that it's not just a droning soundscape.  Nah, this takes somewhat of a post rock styled approach due to the fact that the tracks build and climax effectively.  "Clinodactyl" is probably my favorite song for this reason, since it follows the most "normal" progression and contains the most active delivery on the album.  I wouldn't put it in the same camp as Monolithe, since that's a band playing a style built on atmosphere and then just loading it with riffs, because this is the opposite of riffy, but a lot of things still end up happening.  There are tons of infinitesimal changes in melody and atmosphere, but they all amount to working up towards a greater whole, instead of distracting what should be a perfectly good soundscape experience with too many notes.  Like I said, Bodycage sort of wraps itself around you and makes you part of the album, and it's a nice experience to get lost in the ambiance of confusion and despair mixed with subtle tones of mellifluous optimism.

That's really the album in a nutshell, "subtle".  It's overwhelming and completely fries my brain with each listen, but the subtleties keep it from being a completely passive experience.  This isn't something I find myself listening to often, but when I'm in the mood it'll strike a very fulfilling chord within me.  It's simple and large enough to encapsulate me in a womb of warm emotion, but with enough subtle complexities for me to recognize the skill in the songwriting.  It doesn't sound like twelve hours of lazy feedback and weird-for-the-sake-of-it nonsense like Sabazius or Bull of Heaven, it instead feels like a lovingly crafted ode to some void near a tear in the universe twenty quadrillion lightyears away.  It's empty and desolate but full of hope and melody.  I dunno, I don't have much to say about Bodycage simply because I just don't think I understand it all that well, but the thing is that I feel it, and that's all that really matters when it comes to this kind of music, no?

Like the last two reviewers I've done this with, Caspian doesn't have a personal site, but he's a great reviewer and it'd be in your best interest to check out his stuff here if you'd like to see music like this tackled by somebody who actually knows what the fuck he's talking about.


RATING - 85%

The Axis of Perdition - Deleted Scenes from the Transition Hospital

I serve none but Korrok!

Now, clearly I'm just rushing out a Halloween themed review, but the question I'm sure many metal fans may be asking is "If you're such a huge King Diamond fan, why not post something he was involved in like Fatal Portrait or Melissa?  They both contain themes pertaining to Halloween".  Well hypothetical reader, you're right, King has a fascination with this holiday that celebrates the dark and macabre like no other.  But let's face it, though Halloween isn't really a "scary" day, in the days leading up to it, we all try to be scared.  Horror movie marathons, haunted houses, getting blackout drunk and trying to take home Big Rhonda, we all do things that we hope will scare us.  King is goofy as hell, I love him and you (should) love him too, but the dude embodies April Fool's Day more than Halloween.  And that's why I've chosen to review the British industrial/black/ambient creatures in The Axis of Perdition, namely their second album: Deleted Scenes from the Transition Hospital.

I'm going to veer off track really quick and explain my thoughts on what horror truly is, what it is that genuinely scares people.  Nobody is truly scared by slasher movies made post-1980, basically only  Halloween and Friday the 13th have any real sense of dread, every other slasher movie since then has all been about the spectacle (unless you count the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre from 1974 as a slasher flick, then there are three acceptable scary ones).  Haunted houses have a bit more emotional investment since you yourself are actually involved, but you know that you're just on rails and will be safe and sound in about a half hour, so there's no real suspense or danger about the people jumping out at you.  When it comes to film, it's the ones that focus on what you don't see that are truly terrifying.  The ones that build slowly and present a suffocating, claustrophobic atmosphere.  John Carpenter's The Thing is my favorite movie ever, and I maintain that nothing else has ever had such a perfect balance of claustrophobic, paranoid terror, and the disgust and grotesquery when things go downhill.  I can't explain what makes Takashi Miike's Audition so great without spoiling it for you, but trust me when I say you should watch it pronto.  Ju-On (what would be remade in America as The Grudge) was probably the last movie to truly scare the fuck out of me, and it's not even a good movie.  It builds up for 80-90 minutes with awful acting and bland characters and shit I just couldn't care less about, but the climax makes you realize how well everything came together, and concludes with such a harrowing final sequence that my breathing was noticeably accelerated when it ended.

And then we have videogames.  Yeah I realize it seems silly, but believe me when I say a videogame, when well done enough, can be the scariest fucking thing imaginable.  The good ones take the slow building, helpless, paranoid atmosphere of good horror films and adds the tension of haunted houses by placing you in control.  Yeah, you can turn the game off, but when you're invested and playing, you may not escape, you may not make it out alive.  One bad choice and you may find yourself face to face with your own mortality.  Most games pegged with "horror" are silly, as I'm sure many people think of the Resident Evil series, which is about as scary as a white sheet with eyes drawn on it, but you catch the right thing and you're in for some grade-A nightmare fuel.  Clocktower, Fatal Frame, Silent Hill, Amnesia, it's series like these that make you feel helpless and alone and terrified of a malevolent something that wants you dead.  Anybody who has ever played these games knows what I'm talking about.  Hell I haven't even been able to find the balls to play Fatal Frame without being surrounded by friends, that shit is soul-draining.

Why the long diversion?  Well part of it is because tangential tirades are as much a part of my shtick as food similes and toilet humor, and the other part of it is because The Axis of Perdition gets their inspiration from the darkest and most twisted of the aforementioned ways to scare the piss out of you, the Silent Hill series.  If you're one of those people who can easily be lost in the imagery that music can create, then I beg of you not to drop any acid or eat too much cheese before listening to Deleted Scenes from the Transition Hospital.  The band's cultural background of being from England seeps through as well, as anybody who watches Cracked After Hours like I do was recently reminded that English horror seems to center around urban environments.  That's what Deleted Scenes truly is, the horror and madness of a long dead and abandoned insane asylum, roving with malevolent apparitions whose sole purpose is to mindfuck you so hard that you give mindbirth.  To nightmares.

There is a strong black metal influence at first, but it seems to diminish as the album goes on, eventually ending more into unsettling ambiance.  "In the Hallway of Crawling Filth" is pretty much the perfect opener for this kind of experience.  Ten minutes of uncomfortable atmosphere, punctuated occasionally by the soulless, dead sound of insanity.  The drum machine works well here as opposed to being distracting like it normally would be.  The cold, dead sound really brings to life the lifelessness of the afterlife, if that deliberately confusing sentence makes any sense to anybody other than myself.  The old, long dead spirits have no empathy, and could not give less of a shit for your well being.  They are cold, dead, soulless beings that want to make you an ex-person yourself, and the frantic sound of the drum machine encapsulates that lifeless frenzy so much more than any warm, tonal human player ever could.  And even then, it is used very sparingly, only a handful of times on the album is there ever any real explosions of traditional music.  Most of the time it's the quiet sound of hooks swaying in the breeze, big steel doors being slammed shut, large, rusty generators churning for the first time in eons.  It is an industrial wasteland that houses horror yet unseen.  And as the album goes on, the frantic drum bursts and distorted screams of torture and dissonant guitars become less and less prominent, with the last big chunk of the album being predominately ambient.

What this creates is that terror of the unknown I mentioned earlier. It makes you anticipate horror behind every turn, but the more turns you take without finding that macabre wretchedness that you're expecting, the more it builds, the more it permeates into your very consciousness and tests the limits of your sanity.  This is what makes a jump scare work, it has to be earned and not just something popping up into frame accompanied by a loud orchestra sting.  It's a fear that embeds itself inside your very core.  And my favorite part is that in the last fifteen minutes or so of Deleted Scenes, there is precisely one loud part, and it's not even the end of the album.  That's what makes this stick with you like the slow building horror of Japanese films, even when the album is done, you still feel that anticipation, that cautiousness that behind this next door could be some other unspeakable Lovecraftian monstrosity.  The near constant white noise in the background of the entire 55 minute experience tests your sanity and loosens your grip on reality.  It shows a disconnect between the real world and this nightmarish realm you've stepped inside, and it's small touches like that that make this album work so well.  Moreso than anything else in this style, the background noises are really what make this so harrowing. The screams, the clicking, the creaking and moaning, the monologue in "One Day You will Understand Why", everything strikes just the right chords within you and puts you in this nightmare you've created for yourself.

Now with all of that said, this record is not perfect.  I find the metal parts really do distract the listener from the atmosphere of the ambiance at times.  The buildup is great and the release is wonderful, but I find it goes on for too long.  It does the right thing, it's not particularly fast or musical, it's more droning, dissonant chords and anguished moaning punctuated with hellish roaring which does keep the mood where it needs to be, but the quiet, ambient parts are just so much more effective that I wish the album was 95% entirely that.  "Entangled in Mannequin Limbs" jumps between the two styles too much to really let my mind take in the imagery, and it suffers for it.

But even with that quibble, I'd still highly recommend Deleted Scenes from the Transition Hospital, as it's probably one of the very few metal albums that actually conveys a sense of dread and terror, even if the metal parts themselves are the album's main downfall.  In a perfect world, this would be almost entirely ambient, consisting only of horrid noises and the occasional anguished cry from the depths of the unknown.  But as it stands, it still manages to depict a world of filth and decay populated by the restless dead who envy the living to the point of hatred.  I love the atmosphere, and the Silent Hill influence is rather strong when the imagery is at its best, and that alone is reason enough to give the album a listen.

Happy Halloween, kids!


RATING - 84%

1349 - Revelations of the Black Flame

Remember all that stuff we were good at? Let's do the opposite

Okay, it's fairly obvious that I have a massive boner for 1349's previous works. Liberation may have had some remarkably thin and buzzy production, but Beyond the Apocalypse and Hellfire are must listens as far as I'm concerned. The band was incredibly good at what they did, which was furious and relentless Black Metal that focused on intensity far more than atmosphere. Sure, it's not what most people prefer, but I'm much more predisposed to that style since I entered BM through the Thrash camp.

So what makes Revelations of the Black Flame so much worse? Frankly, everything the band was good at is conspicuously absent. Instead of the unchained fury, we're barraged with half hearted ambience and slow, dissonant melodies. Of the nine tracks, only "Serpentine Sibilance", "Uncreation", and "Maggot Fetus… Teeth Like Thorns" retain any of the band's former glory. The Pink Floyd cover is interesting if nothing else, but it just goes in one ear and out the other, as do most of the filler tracks. I'm not bitter because the band switched styles; I'm bitter because they're terrible at what they're trying to do here. 1349 is not a group that excels in creating an unsettling atmosphere, nor are they renowned in the world of ambience. Hellfire was a modern classic because there are few bands that can cram as much intensity and aggression into one record as well as 1349 can. It barely let up, so I can't help but wonder why they decided it would be such a great idea to abandon what made them so memorable and enjoyable in the first place. The bottom line is that Revelations of the Black Flame is fucking lame. If you want an ambient soundscape integrated with Black Metal, stick with bands like Wolves in the Throne Room who know how to make it interesting. Disappointment of 2009 by far.

RATING - 18%

Karl Sanders - Saurian Meditations

Ra is pleased...

One should always judge an album on it's own merits, and looking at the score you can clearly see that I did, but I feel it deserves a mention that Saurian Meditation is in some way the usurper that destroyed the creativity of Nile. One thing that made Nile so original was their seamless blending of Egyptian pieces like this album and the melodies that intertwined with their sheer brutality. After this album, it was all gone. Karl not only put the different sounds on separate tracks, but separate fucking albums and bands. So I feel a tad bitter towards this album for enabling Sanders to get all of this out of his system and focus purely on hyperblasting brutality with Nile, but to call this a shitty album should be a capital offense, as this is a mind blowing piece of work.

The one thing that puts Saurian Meditation above the throngs of other faceless ambient projects in the music world, is there is almost never a spot where I feel bored to death. A lot of ambient works tend to drone on and on and on in an attempt to make something "epic" or "mood setting". I call bullshit on this practice, as a lot of people tend to write repetitive garbage that doesn't progress or change at all, which is something I like to call boring as hell. Karl Sanders shows his mastery here as he is able to make every last song interesting and captivating. The atmosphere on this album is wholly encapsulating and really takes me back to the days where the pharaohs ruled over the golden sands.

There are a variety of traditional instruments in use here, from old style Egyptian drums to a freakin' baglama. And even with a wide array of sounds at his fingertips, he maintains a generally restrained take on the songwriting. What I mean by that is nothing is there purely for the sake of being there. Every note from every instrument serves a purpose, whether for buildup or climax, everything falls into place wonderfully. The only, ONLY time the album descends into the pointless wind blowing bollocks that so many atmospheric/ambient bands fall into is Contemplations of the Endless Abyss, and it's probably the only thing holding this album back from a perfect score.

The real highlights to me are the more uptempo numbers (for example, Awaiting the Vultures and The Elder God Shrine), as Karl seems to have a knack for making this project sound metal as hell. Ballsin' A, The Elder God Shrine even has a dirty guitar solo in it, what's not to like? Segments of Luring the Doom Serpent sound like they could be some excellently crushing doom riffs if they were played with some distortion. It is this impeccable talent for songwriting that is shown on this album that leads me to my claim that Karl Sanders is one of the most talented men in death metal today. Even if he spends a majority of his time with a now fairly bland-yet-super-fucking-fast metal output, this album shows above all else his incredibly diverse ability and sheer perfection when it comes to songwriting.

In all, this is an excellent record to relax to, and maybe, while I don't partake, I can imagine it'd make for a great drug trip as well, just a hint for all y'all tokers reading this. To sum up, a near perfect experience that I recommend everybody with ears and a tolerance for anything that isn't naught but raw death blasting intensity. One of the best of '04. That's right, above the likes of Evolution Purgatory, Defying the Rules, Return of the Warrior, Blessed Black Wings, Iron, and even A Celebration of Guilt. About as close to perfect as you can get. I listen to this, and I liken it to having a porn star dispenser in your closet, but without all the grody AIDS and Ron Jeremy stench.

RATING - 98%

Burzum - Daudi Baldrs

Pointless no matter how you judge it

In the name of science, I am going to be as objective as possible in my critique of Burzum's first foray into pure ambiance, Daudi Baldrs. In order to do this, I am going to look at and judge the album from several angles in an attempt to leave all bias out of the picture. In order to remain focused on objectivity, an approach like this is entirely necessary.

FROM A TECHNICAL STANDPOINT: The entire album is made using a MIDI device. Let it be known that MIDI is not an automatic allegiance to suck, and most of the best classic videogame tunes were made with this or can easily be replicated this way. Therefore, I can't bash Varg for releasing an album with this sound, even if it is kind of what he was stuck with at the time. But by that same respect, I can not forgive him for the mind bogglingly lazy songwriting. Each song is quite literally one or two melodies across five instruments that are repeated ad nauseam. There is absolutely no substance to virtually any song here. If you listen attentively, you're likely to fall asleep. If you keep it as background music, you're likely to never notice it's playing. If you put it on when you try to fall asleep, you'll be unable to sleep because you'll be shaking with rage due to how ungodly boring and pointless this album is. I don't know what kind of human being would hear this and be 100% satisfied with it's content. I understand that Varg comes from a somewhat minimalistic black metal background, but this is pushing it. I've heard more interesting SunnO))) songs, and I fucking HATE drone.

AS A BLACK METAL ALBUM: Ha, this isn't black metal. I know some people who hate this purely because of that, and think it shouldn't have the name of Burzum on it because of it. I just want to point out how absurd that is. Worry not, I'm not actually judging this as a black metal album.

AS AN AMBIENT ALBUM: I am, however, going to judge it as a piece of ambient music. In this respect, it fails extremely hard. Sure, an ambient soundscape shouldn't take center stage and kick your ass like so many other forms of music. But it shouldn't be this utterly inconsequential either. The only reason any of this is memorable is because of the unabashed repetition. Remember what made St. Anger so awful? It was the fact that every song was basically one mediocre/bad song repeated twice from front to back, Varg accomplished this very feat six years prior. Hell, I think the opener is one song repeated three times for nine minutes. Since he made this with a computer, he quite literally copy pasted the same bullshit over and over and over again for seemingly no reason other than to PISS ME OFF. I'll give him credit for at least getting the general atmosphere that he intends to exude to come across well, it's just unfortunate that it drags on for so long. It's unnecessary to prolong these compositions as long as most of them have been. Surely, ten minutes isn't overkill, especially for this genre, but ten minutes is sure as shit overkill for three melodies. The general mood of the album is great, but the content is lacking and frustrating as a result. No development, no evolution, no point. This is an entire album of town music from Zelda. You know, the simple theme that was made to loop endlessly and convey very little. Sure, there's a bit more emotion and suspense in here, but not enough to not imagine Hermodor A Helferd playing over the scene as I punt chickens around Kakariko Village.

AS A COASTER: This seems to be the one thing that this CD is good for. It is wide enough to cover most any size can/bottle of beverage and thick enough to keep the moisture from soaking through. The only downside is that it's rather pricey for it's apparent intended usage. Also, the material and smooth texture allow it to slide around a little bit more than is comfortable, but it keeps the Schlitz sweat off of my coffee table, so I endorse Varg's unintended line of coasters.

AS A FRISBEE: This is probably the most fun you can have with the disc, but it's also the most dangerous. If you are playing with a partner that throws it too hard, there is a possibility you could cut your hand or get the CD embedded in your skull. And after the headache and metaphorical embedding it'll give you from listening to it, this is the last thing you want to happen. If you try to avoid this problem by playing fetch with your dog, this is only good for one throw, as your dog's bite will most likely break it.

FINAL THOUGHT: Well, no matter how you judge it, this isn't worth much at all. It's an incredibly boring journey through what should be a fascinating and encapsulating story. Daudi Baldrs features six pedestrian compositions with no development in the melodies within each track. No progression, no substance, no value. Seriously, when people don't give enough of a shit to spell the artist's fucking name correctly on the cover, you know you've cocked up big time.

RATING - 13%